They wore the familiar blue and white uniforms and ran out of the locker room labeled "Boise State," but this was not the Broncos football team we’re used to seeing at Aloha Stadium.

Or, much of anywhere else for that matter.

Self-destructive penalties? Game-changing turnovers? Dropped passes? Wandering focus?

All the breakdowns that so often scuttled Broncos opponents over the years were suffered by the Broncos in a 38-23 Sheraton Hawaii Bowl loss Tuesday night.

The program that Broncos wide receiver Matt Miller said, "expects perfection" was done in by its many imperfections.

Somewhere June Jones had to have been wondering, "Hey, where were these guys all those years when I was coaching?"

It wasn’t so much that the winningest major college program since 2000 (155-26) had lost, but the uncharacteristic ways the Broncos went about it.

On Boise State’s first possession, for example, two penalties — a hold and a false start — backed them away from the Beavers’ 5-yard line and into a field goal.

The Boise teams we once knew lost on rare occasions, but not because they so thoroughly helped to beat themselves.

In 13 years of combined Western Athletic Conference and Mountain West play, a string during which the Broncos never finished lower than second place, they were the team that made big plays and patiently waited for others to make mistakes and crumble.

A wide-left kick might do them in once in a while, but not an offense that fumbled two touchdowns right into the hands of the opposition in back-to-back quarters.

The same Oregon State defender, cornerback Rashaad Reynolds, as it turned out. Talk about your memorable Christmas Eves, he returned one fumble 3 yards for a touchdown and then took another one back 70 yards for a score to earn MVP honors.

So one-sided had the event become in the third quarter with Oregon State leading 31-6 that much of the announced crowd of 22,234 was left to amuse itself by playing keep away with a football that had landed in the stands.

Maybe we shouldn’t be too surprised about the Broncos’ sudden struggles, given the departure three weeks ago of head coach Chris Petersen for the head coaching job at Washington. It also couldn’t have helped that some of the assistants are heading to Seattle with him, while some others are staying on in the new Boise administration and some others are in limbo.

There was the bizarre chapter in which starting quarterback Joe Southwick was sent home for an alleged violation of team rules. Southwick disputed that he urinated off the lanai of the team’s Waikiki hotel, claimed he was wrongly fingered by teammates and said he took a polygraph examination that should have cleared him.

All in all, not the kind of three-ring circus we usually associate with the button-down Boise State program.

Interim coach Bob Gregory sought to play all that down, saying, "I don’t believe there was any loss of focus by the team, given the distractions this week. We had good bowl practices. But we didn’t make enough plays to stay in the game."

Whoever this team was, it finished 8-5. One more indication it wasn’t the Broncos we once knew since none of them, at least in the WAC and MWC days, ever had five losses or such an un-Boise ending.

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Reach Ferd Lewis at flewis@staradvertiser.com or 529-4820.